Quotes to inspire and reflect

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, ...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.

The problem with intelligent design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school?s curriculum. George F.

Happiness is a state of activity.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

From timber so crooked as that from which man is carved, nothing entirely straight can be made.

Philanthropic people lose all sense of Humanity, it is their distinguishing characteristic.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

[Optimism is] the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

And then, the unspeakable purity and freshness of the air! There was just enough heat to enhance the value of the breeze, and just enough wind to keep the whole sea in motion, to make the waves come bounding to the shore, foaming and sparkling, as if wild with glee.

Oh! dear; I was so miserable! I am sure I must have been as white as my gown.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

A woman should never be trusted with money.

How much I love every thing that is decided and open!

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

If you marry you will regret it. If you do not marry you will regret it. If you marry or do not marry, you will regret it.

Live the wonderful life that is in you.

Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

From this day forward until the end of the world...we in it shall be remembered...we band of brothers.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.

Clearly he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect he acquired it from the gospels.

I am going to Spain to fight an army without a general, and thence to the East to fight a general without an army.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Strength is the outcome of need. H. G.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity. H.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happiness’s.

Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.